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There are many texts and treatises in the literature of both philosophy and economics which express the apparent theme of this article. Indeed, many of the concepts discussed, including liberty, justice and rights, have been treated elsewhere. Philosophers, sociologists, theologians and economists have each argued their respective points of view.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether Brazilian municipalities are losing efficiency when collecting local taxes in response to oil windfalls. In particular, the paper aims to analyze the hypothesis that these grants encourage the benefiting municipalities to collect taxes with excessive administrative costs.

The author estimate a stochastic cost frontier with fixed effects and investigate whether oil revenues impact on the efficiency scores.

The results reveal that the municipalities benefitting from oil revenues (royalties) reduce their efficiency in collecting taxes in response to such grants, which signals that they generate some type of X-inefficiency in municipal public management.

The stochastic cost frontier requires the calculation of input prices for public sector.

Using a cost frontier, it is possible to avoid the problem of mixing technical efficiency with unobservable preferences on public goods, as well as to focus on economic efficiency instead of technical one.